This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 13th, 2019. I'm Kila Brown.

At first blush when the city of San Francisco officially designates the National Rifle Association

as a terrorist group, it looks like an empty symbolic gesture.

But there are practical reasons why such a designation poses a problem.

So says Cato's senior fellow Walter Olson, we spoke this week.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors took up and passed a resolution branding the

National Rifle Association as a quote domestic

terrorist organization unquote and that sounds like they meant to get

attention and they did get attention.

Practically, does that mean anything?

It's got one symbolic side and one practical side, because the resolution is not a sure one.

And the symbolic side, I shouldn't call it just symbolic because it might have some practical effects,

but the mostly symbolic side is simply declaring war as it were, announcing that the NRA is the

most awful thing they could think of calling it. And to do so they had to kind of take a big

step back from dictionaries and law books that have tried to define what terrorism is in the past.

Because you can't use the conventional language of terrorism and turn around and apply it to a membership organization

with millions of American members whose basic role is advocacy.

Presumably at least one of those people lives in San Francisco.

Yeah, I mean you could argue about whether or not they are implying that every member is a terrorist, all the in common... that would not be an unreasonable thing.

If you are a member of a terrorist organization, then probably you've got something

to answer for.

But it, there's a second part of the resolution which announces that the city should take steps rapidly to basically require city contractors

...